Tansy mustard in a phlox colony

 

On February 17th we drove 80 minutes south to Gonzales. Several miles north of the town, on the east side of US 183, we encountered a good colony of phlox, as depicted two posts back. Erect among the supersaturated red and hot pink phlox phlowers stood scattered tansy mustard plants, Descurainia pinnata, like the one you see here. Its cluster of yellow flowers measured only about an inch across.

 

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Yesterday I became aware of an important February 18th opinion piece by Jonathan Turley in The Hill.
Here’s how it begins:

Last year, the Biden administration caved to public outcry and disbanded its infamous Disinformation Governance Board under its “Disinformation Nanny,” Nina Jankowicz. Yet, as explored in a recent hearing (in which I testified), the Biden administration never told the public about a far larger censorship effort involving an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly targeting citizens and groups for disinformation.

Now it appears that the administration also was partially funding an “index” to warn advertisers to avoid what the index deemed to be dangerous disinformation sites. It turns out that all ten of the “riskiest” sites identified by the Global Disinformation Index are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents.

That sounds like a knockoff of China’s “social credit” system which scores its citizens, based in part on social media monitoring.

 

Our government acts unethically when it contributes public money to an organization that blatantly favors the political viewpoint of the administration in power and stigmatizes opposing political viewpoints. If you lean politically left, just imagine how you’d react if you found out that your government was using your tax dollars to extol right-leaning organizations and discredit your left-leaning views. Our government should not be funding any partisan organizations, period.

I invite you to read Jonathan Turley’s full piece. On the good side, just as I became aware of his article, I also found out that in response to it “The National Endowment for Democracy [Is] To Cut Off Further Support for the Global Disinformation Index.” You can read that follow-up article on Jonathan Turley’s own website.

  

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman